O.S.S. 117 n'est pas mort (1957)
Directed by Jean Sacha

Film Review

O.S.S. 117 n'est pas mort would have been a fairly inconsequential spy movie were it not for the fact that it marked the screen debut for the most famous secret agent in French popular fiction - namely Hubert Bonnisseur de La Bath, code name OSS 117.  Jean Bruce's fictional spy first appeared in print in 1949, four years before Ian Fleming published his first James Bond novel.  OSS 117 beat his British rival 007 to the big screen by five years (the first Bond movie being Dr No (1962)), although Bond had already appeared on television in an episode of the American anthology series Climax! in 1954.

As for his earlier Lemmy Caution adventure Cet homme est dangereux (1953), director Jean Sacha took his inspiration from American film noir thrillers of the late 1940s, early '50s.  Indeed, so precisely does O.S.S. 117 n'est pas mort replicate the look and feel of an American crime B-movie of this period that you could hardly fail to mistake it as such if it were dubbed into English.  The moody, expressionistic lighting and exaggerated camera angles bring a touch of class that goes some way to hiding the film's obvious failings - a hopelessly pedestrian script and some incredibly sloppy mise-en-scène - but overall the entire production looks cheap and amateurish, particularly when it is compared with the more polished OSS 117 films made in the 1960s, starting with OSS 117 se déchaîne (1963).

Ivan Desny is a curious choice for the role of OSS 117, more a debonair romantic of the Ronald Colman school of charm than a sexy modern action hero in the Sean Connery mould.  The Swiss actor never became a big star but he had a prolific career, with over two hundred film and television appearances, including Max Ophüls's Lola Montès (1955), Anatole Litvak's Anastasia (1956) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979).  Desny's lack of presence and raw masculinity may have been the reason why he was never asked to reprise the role - he was followed by Kerwin Mathews, Frederick Stafford and John Gavin successively in subsequent films.  O.S.S. 117 n'est pas mort is hardly the most auspicious of screen debuts for a French cultural icon but it just about holds the attention in spite of its low production standards and dawdling, uninspired narrative.

Film Synopsis

French secret agent Colonel Hubert Bonnisseur de La Bath (alias OSS 117) is asked by a close acquaintance Muriel Rousset to recover a set of secret documents that have been stolen from the safe of Sir Anthony Lead.  The latter lives on a sumptuous estate, the Villa Floride, near Toulon on the French Riviera, with his two daughters Anita and Marion.  As the documents are of great strategic value, Hubert has his work cut out trying to recover them, and he comes close to meeting his maker when the brakes on his car are sabotaged.  By staging an accident, Hubert lulls his adversary into a false sense of security and discovers that Sir Anthony's enemy is right on his doorstep...